We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13891018 and marked it off-topic.
I have found you need to make it very clear to clients why you're there, and what the ROI will be for them. After you've done the work, you move onto the next client.
They may be a wealthy business man, they may be a boomer. They may be a startup. You're there to get a job done.
So drop the `Technical qualification` bull####. If you need qualifications, like other people have recommended open up a text book and start reading. Start building web-sites. Start development with Postgresql. Go out and market yourself and your products. See WHAT people want to buy. See what people are willing to pay for products. Go and take night classes in business management/business skills.
You're a discount office guy because you let them treat you like a discount office guy. If you're worried about failure let me tell you now you're going to fail in amazing screwed up ways, but that is part of the fun. You're going to find your own style, you're going to fall in love and be walked over, you're going to get shit but you're not going to grow as a individual, person, and be a human if you are that `Discount Office Guy`
## I will end on this.
Honestly to dear &&&& god. You've got some of the most friendliest, supportive, happy go people on this community web site who I believe would love to give you pointers and critique your work. Leverage what you have, leverage your network.
i was once where you are now. i am no longer there. it took time and a lot of work. it was worth it. you can do it too.
I have seen this in Australian academia: Boomer academics who were permitted to publish a paper every 2-3 years during the first 10+ years of their academic life, and/or defer getting a PhD to ludicrously late in their careers, are now elevated to senior positions supervising students and junior faculty who will not have reasonable careers unless they publish a paper every 2-3 months or better.
The 'boomers' invented most of the 'computer stuff' you use, most 'developers' today are hacks (granted, some are amazing).
Boomers had difficult upbringing, brought real social change, lived through - and ended the Cold War.
Female boomers were expected to be secretaries - and had to fight for the right just to do normal jobs in the workplace.
Even the boys - were expected to do the same jobs their fathers did, mostly boring labour - and only a fraction of them got to go to University.
There was no such thing as 'startups' back in the day - there were zero opportunities for middle class young people to generate wealth or do globally impactful things.
They lived during the draft, and 50 000 of them died in Vietnam.
Millenials are born into massive entitlement, wealth , privilege and opportunity.
You get bored easily, and don't want to do the same job for more than a year - but expect loyalty and long term employment? Yes - boomers had steadier work - but it was also incredibly boring, stagnant - and in real wages, pay was crap.
Boomers could own a small, shoddy home in the suburbs, and were able to have 'a fridge' and 'an oven' and 'a car' - even though they were all crap by today's standards - that was 'The American Dream' and they were generally happy.
If you are born past the fall of the Berlin wall in America - unless you are from a ghetto - you do not know hardship.
As for real estate: the average home price in the US is about $200K. You can afford a home. You just can't be 'Instagram baller'.
As for 'higher positions' - do you think the 'Greatest Generation' just handed over their choice positions to the 'Boomers'? Or do you think it took mostly a lifetime of work and loyalty? If you don't like your job make yourself CEO of your own company. What's stopping you?
American Millenials have more opportunity than any group of people in the entirety of history - enough with your complaining.
It is exactly reality - and that you don't grasp it only validates how utterly self-deluded Millenials are.
By every measure Millenials are doing better.
Millenials have:
+ Better healthcare, more coverage + Better access to education, information, more college grads than ever + More job opportunities, more diverse fields to apply knowlege + More opportunity for wealth creation + A life full of gadgets, toys and trifles that couldn't even be imagined + You have 'fast fashion' - just 20 years ago there was no suh thing. Clothes were expensive. + Your cars are pretty good, stereos are great, they are fun to drive. Drive a car from the 1970's - they are shit-boxes + You have access to unlimited entertainment and music. In the 1970s' you had 10 records. You wanted to listen to more you went to your friends house. + You have more mobility and access to jobs not only around America, but around the world. + Millenial girls can actually have careers and jobs - and not have to fight vicious stereotyping.
It's basically disgusting that this generation should make existential complains.
What are your beefs?
That you don't bet to be CEO after 1 year?
That you can't live in a baller apartment in SF and have to actually commute from the burbs?
That you don't have job security? Well, you could, if you wanted a more boring job.
That you have school debt? Every generation did. You could have gone to a state school, private school is a luxury.
All of these gripes are really sad 'Oh the Boomers fed everything up' and 'life sucks'. Bullshit.
Provide some facts.
Other than University being a little more expensive - I don't see anything that is remotely more difficult. And FYU with interest rates so low compared to the 15% it was in the 1980s, I say in real dollars, maybe that's not so bad.
You cite no actual quantitative measures to support this claim, so rather than rebutting with such I'll just say this: by many economic measures, Millenials are worse off than boomers (by a few, they're also worse of than Gen X, though by more Gen X is in the worst position of the three, though it usually gets left out of comparisons.)
> All of these gripes are really sad 'Oh the Boomers fed everything up' and 'life sucks'. Bullshit.
It's true that the f-ing up (specifically, of the features in the politico-economic system that resulted in aggregate gains being widely distributed) mostly happened wat the end of the time when the "Greatest" Generation was running the show, the Boomers just were the last generation to have a substantial fraction of their working life before things were f-ed up.
The economy is structured as a ponzi scheme. The ponzi scheme will collapse and many unsympathetic boomers will go broke.
To take your interest rate example. Prices are inversely correlated to interest rates. If you buy when interest rates are high (low prices) and sell when interest rates are low (high prices) then you benefit enormously. Since interest rates are pretty much as low as they can go then there is no upside left for millennials. Only downside. I, like many millennials, wish for much much higher interest rates. Low interest rates are another wealth transfer from those with earnings (millennials) to those with capital (boomers).
I do not suggest that all millennial complaints are valid. I'm simply saying that they shouldn't be dismissed with technological handwaving. The hidden message in the complaints is that we're in this together. The ponzi scheme economy hurts all of us.
I think the current generation American kids will be even more worse.
When I saw kids in the US and when I see the kids in India. Its just feels like American kids live in some kind of Disneyland. The level of competitiveness and hard work as a culture in kids in India have is just a whole double digit factors higher.
The fact is that US ecosystem is largely saved because of the Economic inertia and the endless stream exceptionally talented pool of great people who immigrate there. That large replenishing pool of people pays for the party forward.
Helicopter parenting is not new (except for the name), and is neither unique to nor universal among parents of Millenials.
> Judging by the American economy and the state of world affairs, doesn't seem like boomers are all they crack themselves up to be either.
To be fair to the Boomers, while they certainly failed to fix it, the damage was mostly done by the "Greatest Generation" (the strong economy the GG often gets credit for was created when the GG were in their youth and the Lost Generation was running the show.)
No cell phones.
No GPS.
No soft contact lenses.
No electronic fuel injection (carburetors! yay!)
No Google
I can keep on going with this for a long time
LIFE WAS A LIVING HELL FOR BOOMERS! BE SO HAPPY YOU WERE NOT ONE!
Just a minor nitpick.
Something is strongly wrong with your reasoning if you think that boomers did so much things right and failed miserable in their most important job that is raise kids.
I would like to a read a serious response from a detractor.
They didn't even need degrees. And my mother is a perfect example of how boomer women being expected to be secretaries is anachronistic SJW nonsense. She never attended university, just started working as a junior claims person at an insurance firm in the 70s, showed up for work for 30 years and ended up in the boardroom with stock options. Never faced any discrimination. And she would be the first to admit she never put much into her career - no need for constant re-training, seminars, conferences, when she was home she was home.
While enjoying these comfortable lives, their generation with their hippy views presided over explosive increases in immigration to most western countries, and are the architects of wealth-hoarding tricks like buy-to-let and all kinds of snaky BS union-breaking contract work. The bottom line is, as a young person today you simply couldn't repeat their lives in terms of comfort and financial security. To match it, you'd need to put in several times the effort and hours they did, with a lot more anxiety biting at your heels.
The first Millennials came of age to the images of those planes hitting the WTC and, as corny as it is, that was some incredibly apt symbology. The few of us who manage to be "anti-fragile" may make out good from this new era, but that the security of the ordinary middle-class majority has been shattered is indisputable.
In the modern world, for most people, there's nothing productive to do and no fame to get from it.
In the USA, all the highways are already built (and even when they're failing, their fixing will be postponed). High speed rail lines weren't, and they're not going to be. Not on any human time frame.
So most people are engaged with running pre-built technosphere that is slowly falling apart, with no new developments, for ever-shrinking pay, while more and more money are extorted from them to pay for previous generations entitlements, and also for medicine, real estate, tuition and law, which from services all turned into endless money sinks.
Friges and ovens are not the alpha and omega of life. Productivity, respect and growth are. Are we having any all across post-development countries?
"Productivity, respect and growth are. Are we having any all across post-development countries?"
Have any of you ever taken a basic Econ course?
'No room for growth'?
THE ECONOMY HAS BEEN GROWING EVERY YEAR.
Do you realize that 'feature phones' to 'cell phones' is economic growth?
Do you realize that '2G to 4G' is economic growth?
Do you realize that more people going to college than ever before is good?
There are new medicine trials every day - gene therapy. Jesus H Christ you can now chose the gender and eye colour of your offspring. That's how advanced we are.
100 years ago - there was no 'medicine'. 95% of all operations were basically amputations with crossed fingers of no infection.
Do you realize that the amount of air travel in the world has doubled in the last little while?
That you have access to 100000x more information that people just 20 years ago, before the internet?
You do realize that the iPhone/Android/Facebook are only 10 years old?
That 20 years ago there was no YCombinator?
I'm just going to assume that most of you are too young to have any perspective, because I just can't understand the commentary here.
When you hit your 30's, you can look back and your own life can be a literal testament to the change.
Yes, some things stay the same, but at least in terms of material productivity, things are better.
If the college provides same service while extorting twice as much money, this means that economy grows, but people become poorer, more indebted and strained. The economy might be growing; but WE don't.
> Do you realize that more people going to college than ever before is good?
But when they graduate they have worse employment prospects than High School graduates 40 years ago.
> Do you realize that '2G to 4G' is economic growth?
But how many participate in it as makers and not just as consumers?
When Interstates happened, a lot of people made them with their hands. But now, very few people are directly involved in the 2G to 4G transition and are proud for it. The others just feel like a passengers in a fast moving bus without any control of the route, or, for that reason, trip safety.
> Jesus H Christ you can now chose the gender and eye colour of your offspring
But can you afford it today as a middle-income person? If you can't, it's not there yet. What's the engagement numbers?
> You do realize that the iPhone/Android/Facebook are only 10 years old?
...but I liked more what was before them. I would have preferred N900 and LiveJournal, too bad I don't have this choice realistically. Talk about bus passengers.
> Do you realize that the amount of air travel in the world has doubled in the last little while?
How many people are making it happen? And not on the crappy jobs such as flight attendants? Wait - now even the pilots have their jobs unsatisfactory thanks to long hours and bad pay.
> When you hit your 30's
I'm 32.
Instead of extending these advantages to young people, they sold them down the river to an actor pretending to be a conservative, who got off on police shooting protestors and buddied up with apartheid South Africa. Why? So they could get pay less taxes and get false promises of "animal spirits" inflating their 401ks. And when the social progress they ostensibly fought so hard for came up against the wall, they chose to let schools be resegregated, throw all the POC drug users in jail, and have LGBTQ people die of AIDS (because, y'know, property values).
This disgusting rightward lurch sets the stage for a CIA scion to pretend he was a cowboy and kill half a million innocent people in the Middle East and destroy the economy. And now a parody of Reagan himself to do the same or worse, putting the nail in the coffin of Millennial's future.
And also: Ended the Cold War? Look at 2017 and think about that one. More like destroyed an already poor country with corrupt Capitalism, so the KGB could take over and come back at us even stronger.
Utter bullshit.
It's not even anectodal - it's just complete narrative fiction.
This is HN, try some facts.
Which material or social elements regarding standard of living between the generations, implies that 'Millenials have it harder'?
By every external measure, you have more wealth and opportunity than any generation in history.
"This disgusting rightward lurch sets the stage for a CIA scion to pretend he was a cowboy "
What the smack are you on about?
This is HN not the Huffington Post.
"Ended the Cold War? Look at 2017 and think about that one."
If you were alive during the cold war, then you know that 2017 is obviously not the cold war.
Stop complaining.
As a Gen Xer, I was alive during a lot of the late Cold War, and I'm very much aware that after the brief hiatus with the fall of the Soviet Union, there's been wide talk of a growing new cold war between the US and Russia since the Balkans crises of the 1990s, and that that Cold War has included many of the hallmarks of the old one, including proxy wars, direct saber rattling, violent covert actions, attempts by each side to subvert the government of the other principal and/or allies, etc.
Anyway, here's a good breakdown on how we're worse off financially: http://younginvincibles.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/FHYA-...